One of the major challenges I faced when my kids began playing sports was how to work with all the men*. Youth sports back then were pretty much a No Mom's Land. Nearly all the coaches were men; those who ran the youth sports programs were also, by and large, men. Fast-forward twenty three years later and the reality is that not much has changed. Most of the coaches are still men [1]. Ditto for clubs, leagues and youth sports organizations at the national level (US Lacrosse being a notable exception).
In my 2006 book, Home Team Advantage, I argued that women and mothers needed to take a more active role [2] as both coaches and administrators, and offered advice on how they could do that. Left on the cutting room floor in the book editing process was a section where I explained why men who dominate youth sports act the way do, knowledge which I thought - and continue to think - might help sports moms better deal with the men, whether as fathers, coaches, or administrators, and might also help fathers understand what motivates them so they could better control the hard-wired impulses that too often lead them to act in embarassing and hurtful ways.
Over the years, and based on a lot of research, I have come to the conclusion that the way men act in the youth sports context can be at least partially explained by evolutionary biology and hormones.
A story from my experience with a coach back in my sons' days in youth baseball is, I think, illustrative:
When my sons were twelve they were on the same baseball team. Practice started at 3:30 p.m., games at 4:30. My boys would race home from school, grab a snack, put on their uniforms and beg me to bring them to the field early so they could get in some extra fielding practice. We usually got to the field about half an hour before practice began and I would hit them grounders. Because Spencer was a catcher, Taylor enjoyed playing first base and Hunter liked shortstop or third. It worked out great. Eventually, their teammates would join them. It was a nice way to have a few minutes to loosen up, just hit the ball around and have fun.
This day, however, was different. I was having a fun time with my sons and within ten minutes the group had grown to six boys, all laughing and having fun. Two of the boys who joined us were my sons' school buddies who played for the team we would be playing in the championship game in an hour's time.
We were having a wonderful time until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the coach of the other team - a man I will call "Bob." Actually, I heard him first, as he told one of his two sons to hurry up; it was time to practice. As he approached, he demanded in a loud and insistent voice that we "get off the field" because he was "here to practice."
I took a few breaths. I had heard that Bob had been banned from coaching summer baseball the previous year after he was alleged to have verbally abused and pushed one of the players around, a player who was now on my sons' team. I looked at my watch. Fifteen minutes until the official start of practice. After reminding Bob that practice hadn't started, I told him that we were early and wanted some extra time for fielding grounders. Bob said, "I don't care. We have a game and I am the coach. Are you a coach?" Bob proceeded to do everything short of physically moving me and my players off the field. He yelled at the two boys from his team who had joined our practice to "get the hell off the field." I called back to them that they could stay. Then I told Bob that the rest of his players were free to join us; we were happy to have them until practice started.
Bob continued to harass me, but I refused to budge, knowing that I was teaching my sons a valuable lesson in how to have fun and be inclusive. They also knew that the field wasn't reserved for practice until 3:30.
Was the way Bob acted acceptable? Absolutely not. Was it understandable? Yes. Why? Because just about everything Bob did he was to a large extent hard-wired to do:
My experience with men like Bob, which has been largely confirmed by what experts in the field of evolutionary biology and psychology say about men and sports, suggests the following:
First, men don't just like sports (and, in that respect, they aren't much different than a lot of women), they need sports. They get involved in youth sports, as fathers, coaches, and administrators, because their involvement fills two critical needs: a social need (to be with other men and find out where they stand in the social hierarchy) and a need for competition.
The need for competition, in my view, is a primary explanation for the focus of youth sports on winning and losing: men really believe that there isn't any point in playing sports if not to declare winners and losers.
Men hate to be dominated. In general, men are more willing than women to elbow others aside to get ahead. As a male friend Jake, used to say, men want to "bury all of the other kids so theirs are left standing; even if they end up on the court alone." Among boys, toughness, a refusal to back down and athletic ability take one to the top of male hierarchies. Indeed, studies show that it is toughness and athleticism, not brains, that best predict social rank among fifteen-year-old boys.
Second, youth sports provide men an opportunity to be in control. Men are attracted to the rules and the highly organized way most youth sports programs are now run (of course, men are the reason youth sports are as highly organized and rules-based as they are in the first place!). Youth sports gives men yet another arena in which they can run the show and be in control.
Third, because men tend to believe that the natural social order is hierarchical and view the world in comparative terms, the youth sports arena allows men to know where they and their sons/daughters/teams stand in relationship to others.
Fourth, sports are men's battlefield, their turf if you will. As one journalist recently observed, youth sports is now run by a "generation of parents who did not go to war [living in] an era in which sports and their forums become the temples and the battlefields, athletes our gods and warriors."
What explains the hypercompetitiveness of some men involved in youth sports, whether it is as a coach, specatator or parent?
Perhaps, say experts, it is the hormone testosterone and a desire to compete rooted in the ancient past.
According to 1999 study by a psychologist from the University of Utah, testosterone levels in men watching sports go up and down with the score, increasing 20% in fans of winning teams and decreasing 20% in fans of losing teams - a phenomenon known as "basking in reflected glory." This goes a long way to explaining why many men love to watch sports so much: it gives them a kind of high.
Testosterone magnifies the positive effect of winning and the negative effect of losing. Evolutionary biologists believe these hormonal differences are explained by natural selection. Since a boost in testosterone creates a feeling of euphoria and exhilaration, men who compete and win, even men who are merely coaches or spectators, have an incentive to compete that women, whose testosterone levels (yes, women have testosterone, too!) don't go up or down when their teams win or lose, ordinarily don't share.
On the plus side, youth sports bring out the best in men.
Men are generally adept at teaching sportsmanship because sportsmanship is a valuable aspect of the male character. This is because, as Eli Newberger points out in his book, The Men They Will Become, sportsmanship embodies "civility or courteousness, respect for both the rules and for the welfare of everyone playing the game, self-control when something frustrating has occurred, a capacity to win without overvaluing the victory, and to lose without taking it overly to heart, and a sense of proportion that focuses much of the time on the sheer pleasure of the game." The development of these values begins in the first years of a boy's life.
A father's physical play with his children helps them develop self-control; that when the play is over, they have to learn to "settle down." While studies show that fathers do more roughhousing with pre-school boys, the results of such play are beneficial: children rated as popular by their teachers are most likely to have parents who have engaged in regular physical play with them. Children with involved fathers fare better in school, have fewer behavioral problems, and do better in wide range of social indicators.
Unfortunately, men's evolutionary history, hormones and view of the world also cause problems in the youth sports context.
To begin with, men can have tunnel vision, viewing everything through a competitive lens. As my old high school English teacher and long-time Boston Globe sportswriter, Tony Chamberlain, recently wrote, "Fathers of young children often get so intense about their children acquiring sports skills of dubious future value that they often lose the big picture. ... Whether it's throwing a baseball, stopping a pond hockey puck, taking a jump shot, or making a slalom turn through the gates, fathers can't resist going at it much too early." (Andre Agassi's father is a classic example: when his son was an infant, he made a makeshift mobile of tennis balls and hung it over his crib!).
Even Tony fell victim to the male propensity to be so intense about teaching their children about sports that they go overboard, admitting that, in teaching his son fishing and sailing, he was a "little obnoxious," to the point where he would drill his son about things that he would most likely have picked up "naturally when they go fishing a few times." As Tony wryly observed, "[L]eave it to a dad to turn everything fun into a drill."
Instead of merely being supportive and empathizing with a child who is down because she played poorly, let in the winning goal, or went 0 for 4 at the plate, men tend to want to problem solve, giving advice or critiquing the child's athletic performance, which is often exactly the wrong approach.
Because many men tend to view sports more as an end in itself (winning) rather than as a means to a larger end (skill building, teaching larger life lessons about teamwork, cooperation), fathers are more prone to forgetting that sports shouldn't really be about developing kids who win in sports - they are about developing kids who win in life (of course, men - and a not insubstantial percentage of women - will say the two are the same, but I think they are different).
Men also view their child's "failure" in sports through a different lens. "I think a lot of fathers are threatened that if their sons aren't doing well, it's somehow a poor reflection on them. They'll say, ‘Don't be a wimp.' ‘Hit the ball.' Or - and I've heard fathers say this many times at baseball games - ‘You throw like a girl.' And that is the most shaming thing that a boy can be told," says Harvard's Dr. Roberto Olivardia, coauthor of The Adonis Complex.
Given their innate desire to form dominance hierarchies and need to know who is on top and who is on the bottom, men have imposed a pyramidal structure on organized youth sports which has led in the last twenty years to the proliferation of travel/select/elite teams/athletes at the top and the lowly recreational players/leagues at the bottom (never mind that there is no way to predict [3]which children have true athletic talent until they reach puberty). The need of men to sort out winners and losers, and to abide by the rules by which adults play sports, has led them to impose a professional sports model on children at ever-earlier ages, replete with standings and playoffs. A man's emphasis on rules also furthers the male characteristics of power, dominance, and control.
Instead of working to ensure that teams are evenly balanced (as they would be if the kids picked sides playing touch football in their back yards) men often look for ways to ensure precisely the opposite, using player "drafts" [4] and "auctions" to compete with each other and act out "general manager" fantasies: to prove to the other fathers that that they are better judges of "talent", that they can assemble a team that will not only be a winner but will steamroll to the championship at the end of the season.
The male ego can get too tied up in kids' performance. As a result, men are more prone to saying and doing things that are abusive and losing sight of their role, whether it as parent or coach. All too often, a man's hormones get the better of him, like the father, who, after attending his twelve year old son's first hockey game (a one-goal loss), charged into the locker room, yanked his son up off the bench and yelled, "You f----g son of a bitch; if you'd hit that guy against the wall you wouldn't have lost the game."
All too often men seek psychic rewards through their children's athletic achievements. A man is more prone to feeling if his child, or the team he coaches, is good and successful then he is good and successful. As Tony Chamberlain observes, "Fathers are all about taking some vicarious joy in the trophies their kids earn, as if it proves that they, the tribal elders, have fulfilled their duties to pass along skills and values to the young braves."
Most men also seem to labor under the misconception that they were talented athletes. In one study 4,000 men were asked if they believed they could have been professional athletes if not for a bad coach, an injury or some other misfortune. Despite the fact that only one person in 10,000 is a top pro athlete, an astonishing 70% of the men surveyed somehow deluded themselves into believing they possessed the talent to make it to the pros.
While men's fundamentally competitive nature is never going to change, it is time to eliminate the adult male ego from youth sports, as Bob Bigelow, co-author of Just Let The Kids Play, suggests.
A man's natural desire to be in control also has negative consequences in the youth sports arena. Not only does a father's inclination to direct his child's play in early childhood end up carrying over into youth sports, but when men take to the stands as spectators, where they have to give up control - to the coach, to the officials, to the players - their lack of control sometimes causes them to act inappropriately towards those to whom they have ceded control.
Paradoxically, fathers who are rigid and controlling toward their adolescent sons end up raising sons who think of themselves as less masculine and possess more, not less, passive personalities. This is because, as Eli Newberger points out, "positive gender identity and social development are encouraged when a father allows his son to be reasonably self-assertive."
Because men are driven to establish dominance hierarchies, they tend to view sports talent as a way to climb the male pecking order and a gateway to male privilege and power. Reinforcing the patriarchy in this way is not a good thing. Because men value rules and order so highly, believing that games are supposed to be played by the rules, and that modification of the rules makes a game something other than what it is recognized to be, men have resisted modification of the rules that apply in youth sports (such as the size of fields, height of baskets, size of teams), even if modification of the rules would allow for increased practice and playing opportunities for all players, regardless of skill level and experience, and provide a more enjoyable game for all, not just the skilled minority.
It is a fact that men, by and large, aren't as good at listening as women and in perceiving outsiders - those not in the club - as threats. All too often, the board of directors of a youth sports organization run by men (and remember: the vast majority are run by men) will side with coaches and brush aside criticism, especially if it comes from a woman. Just one case in point: a Ohio mother of 4th grader who was verbally abused by an assistant youth football coach e-mailed me after she requested that the coach be fired or at least suspended. She was told by board president that they could not remove a coach just because of one incident; she was told she could bring matter to the board but was warned that board would side with the coach; she knew others had seen the abuse but were afraid to speak up at the board meeting because of likely retaliation against their sons.
Men tend to link sport expertise with masculinity and leadership with male superiority. By placing higher value on male qualities, sports create and reinforce a link between sports and masculinity. This is reflected in the under-representation of women in coaching and leadership positions in sport. In turn, such an attitude permits the notion that coaching male athletes is the exclusive domain of men, perpetuates the belief that the feminine in sport is secondary or should be non-existent, and automatically devalues the sport experience, achievement and self for participants who are female.
Indeed, as Newburger argues, "The values that are being reinforced in organized sports are not so much the traditional values of ‘sportsmanship' but the core values of a society that has made sports into a business: individual competitiveness; a façade of self-confidence; the demonstration of earnest effort; a provisional willingness to bear pain and injury for the greater good of the company, yet an apprehension that loyalty is pretty much a one-way street, not to be reciprocated if the company loses confidence in the value of the individual; indifference to those who lose out in competition; willingness to be aggressive and to injure others in the interests of one's team."
Studies show that men's team sports encourage boys to conform to masculine stereotypes and traits such as susceptibility to violence ("be tough", "kick ass"), a winning-at-all costs mentality, emotional inexpressivity ("suck it up"), and stoicism ("no pain, no gain"). Coaches, parents, and peers further legitimate violent athletic identities by affording increased status to individuals who use on-the-field aggression to achieve victory.
A male's drive to test an opponent's response to physical aggression all too often results in unacceptable behavior. One egregious example occurred recently when a group of hockey coaches in Michigan had a group of 20 teenagers stand in a circle at center ice, and then have two players stand in the middle of the circle, shed their helmets and gloves and engage in a fistfight. When the fight was over (in other words, when one of the players "won"), the coaches would motion two more players to step forward, drop their gloves and square off.
Because exposure to competition is integral to a child's development; and to deny competitive spirit and innate desire to win is to deny being human, there is no point in suppressing the innate competitiveness of men. But it definitely needs to be reigned a bit (well, perhaps much more than a bit). While a man's gender is a big part of who he is, and it is clear that human nature is gendered to the core, the secret is to work with a man's nature, work with a man's innate gender-based propensities, rather than trying to reshape them according to the dictates of late-twentieth-century political correctness.
As Dr. Leonard Sax argues in his recent book, Why Gender Matters, "The solution to taming a [man]'s aggressive drive is NOT to squelch the drive every time it appears. ... Instead you want to transform the [man]'s aggressive drive. Sublimate it into something constructive."
In trying to reign in the male ego and competitive drive, women have to be careful, though, to avoid attacking men's masculinity. The fact is that guys need to outperform other guys, or at least keep up with them. Women need to understand that men tend to filter their worth through their performance.
Experts, such as Celia Brackenridge, observe that adherence to the process of man-making through sport, or what she calls the "cultural masculinity rite" is "still one of the most pervasive features of contemporary western culture. Sport has also been described as one of the few areas where ‘men can still be men' and where women are considered intruders. There are accounts of the hyper-masculine heterosexual culture of sport, with sexually intense initiation rituals [hazing] and demeaning attitudes towards women. In other words, gender culture contributes to the generation and maintenance of the sexual stereotypes that underpin harassment."
What women need to keep men from doing, then, is reinforcing negative gender stereotypes in the way youth sports are organized and run. A man's over-competitive, kill-or-be-killed, anti-tenderness and caring characteristics that are part and parcel of the traditional masculine gender role should have little or no place in our children's lives. Men's competitive nature needs to be balanced with a woman's natural cooperativeness, empathy, and holistic approach to parenting.
* For convenience, I often write, "men are like this and women are like that." lest offense be taken, I am only implying that, on average or statistically, "most men/women tend to be like this or that."
Posted February 23, 2012
Links:
[1] https://www.momsteam.com/node/2044
[2] https://www.momsteam.com/node/1281
[3] https://www.momsteam.com/node/1049
[4] https://www.momsteam.com/node/2896
[5] https://www.momsteam.com/team-parents/most-youth-sports-coaches-are-men-all-team-parents-are-women-study-finds
[6] https://www.momsteam.com/team-parents/coaching/why-women-make-great-youth-sports-coaches